AUSTRALIA: Going American

After examining Australia with a cold and
analytic eye, Britain's terrible-tempered Malcolm Muggeridge (onetime
editor of Punch) last week shot off, in the pages of the Sydney Morning
Herald, a characteristic Muggeridge salvo: "Superficially, Australia is
very British, indeedin fact, I should say decidedly more British than
Britain is. It constitutes a kind of National Park in which extinct
British species can be seen living in their natural habitat. But I
cannot help thinking that Australia's Britishness belongs more to a
dream than to reality."

The trouble, as Muggeridge saw it, is that "what is really happening is
that in...